Don’t worry! Hillary says……. 29 January 2010

A demonstrator confronts the police during a protest outside the EDO and ITT manufacturing plants in Brighton, southern England. Demonstrators protested outside the plants, which they say manufacture parts for Israeli weapons, during a demonstration to mark the end of the conflict between Israel and Palestine one year ago today. [Reuters]

Hillary says….. we won’t talk to the “real bad guys”. Oh no not us. We’d die of mortification. Fer sure…

Clinton says no talking to ‘really bad guys’ in Taliban

(AFP) – 1 hour ago

WASHINGTON — US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has ruled out talking to the “really bad guys” in Afghanistan, promising that a new drive to woo moderate Taliban would not set back women’s rights.

Clinton doubted that Afghan leaders or the international community would reach out to hardliners like Mullah Omar, who headed the Taliban regime which imposed an austere brand of Islam from 1996 to 2001.

“We’re not going to talk to the really bad guys because the really bad guys are not ever going to renounce Al-Qaeda and renounce violence and agree to re-enter society,” Clinton said in an interview with National Public Radio broadcast on Friday.

“That is not going to happen with people like Mullah Omar and the like.”

Clinton was speaking from London, where a global conference threw its backing behind a multimillion-dollar fund to support Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s plan to integrate militants who lay down their arms.

The chief US diplomat, a longtime advocate of women’s rights, acknowledged that some Afghan women were concerned about dealing with the Taliban — whose regime forbade women from going to school, working or traveling on their own.

However, she added: “I don’t think there is cause for alarm that the current government or any foreseeable government would turn the clock back like that.”

She said it was crucial for women’s rights that “there is enough power in the state and through the new Afghan security forces to make sure that there’s never a resurgence of the Taliban that would come close to taking over large parts of the country.

“That’s what we’re preventing,” said Clinton.

She rejected suggestions the strategy would confuse people just as the United States and its allies pour another 40,000 troops into Afghanistan to battle Islamic extremists.

“You can’t have one without the other,” said Clinton.

“Only a surge of military forces alone without any effort on the political side is not likely to succeed; only an effort to make peace with your enemies without the strength to back it up is not going to succeed.”

[M]any people are calling Zinn a radical. I suppose he was, in the getting-to-the-root-of-matters sense. But to me it reveals how fucked our system remains that a person as plain spoken, down to earth, and direct as Howard Zinn is viewed as a fringe figure, an oddball lefty who took a “contrarian” stance against the status quo. If Zinn was weird, then let’s be weirdos too. Thank you, Howard.

Gawker’s John Cook FOIAed the late Rep. Henry Hyde’s FBI file, and finds that the Illinois congressman was the target of a major corruption investigation — though he was never charged.

Still, the file contains details that don’t look good, alleging that “Hyde offered to steer an Illinois Department of Public Aid contract to a mob-affiliated New York company called Computer Specifics Corporation in 1972 in exchange for a cash kickback amounting to 10% of the total contract.”

The contract was never given, and the story never leaked, though the documents suggest the story may have torpedoed Hyde’s bid at a cabinet post in the Reagan Administration.

A colleague notes that it’s remarkable that this wasn’t used against Hyde when he was leading the charge on impeachment, which has either to do with Clinton’s restraint or, perhaps more likely, the FBI’s discretion.

The ex-mistress of two-time presidential candidate John Edwards wants a “very private and personal” videotape back from a campaign aide who wrote a book about the politician, according to court documents.

Rielle Hunter was granted a temporary restraining order against former Edwards loyalist Andrew Young in a North Carolina court. It seeks the return of photos and videos, including one she says she made in 2006 while working for Edwards.

“In or about September 2006, using my video camera, I authored a personal video recording that depicted matters of a very private and personal nature,” Hunter wrote in an affidavit filed Thursday. “In 2006, I was also having an intimate relationship with Edwards.”

“The decision was made that the Video be destroyed” in December 2006, Hunter wrote. She said she pulled out the tape from the cassette and stored it in a box with personal belongings.

In his book, Young describes viewing a sex tape that showed Edwards and a woman he assumed was Hunter. Young says some videotapes were inside a “box of trash” that Hunter left behind at a home he rented for her. He says that the tape had been pulled out of its cassette casing, but that he was able to fix it. …

Attorneys for Edwards said in a statement Friday that they have not had an opportunity to read the book but urged “extreme caution” about it. The lawyers, Wade Smith and James Cooney III, said it’s obvious from media reports that “there are many allegations which are simply false.”

“It appears that Andrew Young is primarily motivated by financial gain and media attention,” they said.

My first thought when it seemed there REALLY might be a sex tape was “was the haridresser in the room too”… then I ran into some doggerel about the rumors of size… and is it so great it has its own helmet of hair as well.:lol:

On September 10, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld held a press conference to disclose that over $2,000,000,000,000 in Pentagon funds could not be accounted for. Rumsfeld stated: “According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.” [1]

Such a disclosure normally would have sparked a huge scandal. However, the commencement of the attack on New York City and Washington in the morning would assure that the story remained buried. To the trillions already missing from the coffers, an obedient Congress terrorized by anthrax attacks would add billions more in appropriations to fight the “War on Terror.”

The Comptroller of the Pentagon at the time of the attack was Dov Zakheim, who was appointed in May of 2001. Before becoming the Pentagon’s money-manager, he was an executive at System Planning Corporation, a defense contractor specializing in electronic warfare technologies including remote-controlled aircraft systems. [2-3]

Zakheim is a member of the Project for a New American Century and participated in the creation of its 2000 position paper Rebuilding America’s Defenses which called for “a New Pearl Harbor.” [4]

The link is from a racist site which I hate to post, but it was the only site I found on the subject. I remember when the story came out then disappeared.

Here is another interesting article.

Following Zakheim and Pentagon trillions to Israel and 9-11

Judicial Inc points out that Grandpa Zakheim was born in 1870, Julius Zakheim (Zhabinka), in the Ukraine, a Russian rabbi who married a relative of Karl Marx. He was a Menshevik/Bolshevik and played a leading role in the 1905 turmoil that paved the way for the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The Bolshevik master plan called for the state of Israel, which was chosen for its proximity to the world’s oil and an area of religious significance.

Dov’s Father, Rabbi Jacob I. Zakheim was born in 1910 and reared in Poland’s swarm of Zionist hard guys, read assassins and bombers. His Polish town, near Bilaystok, also brought us Yitzhak Shir, and family friends included Menachem Begin and Moshe Arens. Dov’s father was an active member of Betar, formed in 1923 in Riga, Latvia. Its goal was to control the Middle East (and its oil). It was known that the Jewish people needed their own country and they chose Palestine and claimed it a Jewish state “on both sides of the Jordan.”

Betar was in essence a terrorist organization formed because Zionists were sick of being chased from and arrested in country after country. They wanted both a place to escape and a base for their power. Betar joined forces with the Haganah, Irgun, and Stern gangs. With no prospect of a Jewish state in sight, they argued that armed struggle against the British was the only way. Since Britain occupied Palestine and was containing them they went on a blood feast of bombings that killed hundreds of British soldiers. The British pulled out, but the Zionists continue to maul the Arabs to this day.

Zinn, on the other hand, was always recognizably a human being among other humans. He didn’t hector, he didn’t sneer, and he was never abstract. He made you think: in a better world, there would be more people like this. And maybe I could be more like him, since he doesn’t make it look that hard.

Here’s one of my favorite things he wrote, from his autobiography:

The events of my life, growing up poor, working in a shipyard, being in a war, had nurtured an indignation against the bullies of the world, who used wealth or military might or social status to keep others down.

That’s not a manifesto about democracy, freedom, the means of production blah blah blah. It’s just a simple perspective that anyone can understand: bullies of any kind are bad.

I agree, and I think that’s pretty much all there is to say about politics and life. Bullies are bad, from the ones who make fun of the kid in third grade who smells to the ones who douse mideast villages with white phosphorus. People of the world unite: you have nothing to lose but all those bullies.

This is a plug for sure, but kind of an organic one because our ability to get out the word on this is limited by the lateness of the hour.

But from 8 to 10 PM Eastern tonight, Rachel, Chris Matthews and I will be presenting a two-hour special report on the President’s remarks (and answers) to the Republican Retreat (and wow did it live up to that name).

We will be aiming for analysis and perspective for sure, but not to the point of carving this up into little soundbites. We will be running, as they say, “large chunks” and then cutting back to the studio to see which one of our jaws can drop the closest to the floor.

Parenthetically, I always said the actual “Prime Minister’s Question Time” on C-SPAN was one of my favorite tv shows but the thought of doing an American version gave me the mental image of all of our politicians running screaming into the streets after the first five minutes of questioning.

My brief take away..
whoops it IS drafty in here all of a sudden. Anyways…

All sides – ( live with it House Dems!) ..agree.
Barry the Corporate hack and DOD Pork Fairy…
is to be kept on life support.

Both Parties ( sorry Dem newbies! ) need step back from Independent ire that is seeing through the sham of Donklephant collusion…

I saw the whole campaign style town hall re-enactment…
ALL stock questions, all stock answers..
All freshmen year seminar in law school shit..

IMO, The substantive takeaway, in two teased out tids of wordplay that surfaced…is this…
They are going to cap Medicaid TOGETHER.
They are going to aid and abet Health Care “Insurance” Carteliers
TOGETHER.

Politically, if anybody on the Orgasmic Left doesn’t see it, Ob and the GOP are going to run against Pelosi and the Democratic Caucus. TOGETHER.

Barry resisted – as Barry’s level of resistence goes – he resisted going after Pelosi specifically in questions in which she was named as Obstrunctionist ..but his answers , no mistake about it , just made GOP commercials footage for every House Race out there..

The people are stupid. Too many are buying the old line, let’s get htis passed and FIX IT LATER.

LOL… HMO legislation passed in 73, with Kennedy helping Nixon and Kennedy promising that HMO leg was the “first step” to waht used to be called Universal Health Care.

Now we have nominal ins “reform” and fucking punishing mandates with the IRS the watch dog. The insurance companies and Wall St just firming up their oversight of weak flagging bought off government. And the “loyal” Democrats point to congress as “the problem”. St Ob… you know.

The encounter at a Baltimore hotel was unlike any of Mr. Obama’s presidency, or very many other presidencies, for that matter. Such a sustained and public dialogue with a hostile audience is rare for a president. Instead, Friday’s back and forth resembled the British tradition where the prime minister submits to questions on the floor of the House of Commons — something Senator John McCain had promised to do if elected president.

hmm an overview via Mike ALlen Playbook.. There was a rosy flush about it all yesterday, but I think we are moving beyond after glow.

The “mission” for months has been to shift the blame and the pain to congress and to leadership, specifically the House… ob will cover publicly for Reid, tho god knows why.

All I can say is, I cannot stand Nancy… but she has been in electoral politics a lot longer than Ob. She can dole out money, it is over and over how she got ahead in politics. Ob has the weight of his office, it has nto been working. ONE MORE LOSS… and the Republicans count down from Olympic flapdoodle and they include Climate Conflab as well.:lol:

–ABC’s Jake Tapper: ‘The White House has been e-mailing out and tweeting a video link of the exchange. They say it shows the president getting tough questions and giving good answers.’ Anchor Dan Harris asked if this could lead to more bipartisan cooperation. From Tapper’s reply: ‘I have to say: In an election year, with an electorate this volatile, the Republicans seem reluctant to give the president any victories and a bipartisan victory would be a victory. So it’s tough to see how, in an election year, this process goes forward.’

–CBS’s Chip Reid: ‘Here at the White House, some it could be a game-changer for the president. As one official put it, this is the best thing the president has done in a very long time.’ [ugh you go to the R to manage a game changer? I don’t think so –Mcat]

–CBS’s Bob Schieffer, when Katie Couric asked him if the event was a game-changer: ‘I thought it might at least be a game-starter. There was a totally different tone than what we’ve been seeing around here for the last few months. But then about an hour ago, the House Republican Leader’s office put out a scathing press release, it was titled ‘President Obama repeats discredited talking points during dialogue with the House GOP.’ So I guess we’re back to square one.’

–NBC’s Savannah Guthrie: ‘Polls repeatedly show America is fed up with Washington’s ways, so both sides are trying to show it’s the other side’s fault for all this partisan gridlock, Brian.’

So.

Imprisoned journalist and former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal has been taken to the Intensive Care Unit of Schuylkill Medical Center in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, after he was removed from prison for a medical emergency without any notification to his family, friends or lawyers. Prison officials told his supporters he is in diabetic shock. We get an update f […]

Indiana is facing boycotts and fierce criticism following Gov. Mike Pence's new measure that could sanction discrimination by allowing business owners to refuse service to LGBT customers in the name of "religious freedom." Connecticut is the first state to officially boycott Indiana over the move, now San Francisco and Seattle have also impose […]

We look at the case of Frederic "Rick" Bourke, who is considered a whistleblower after he was imprisoned for exposing corruption and bribery in the oil-rich region of the Caspian Sea. Bourke is known for founding the luxury handbag company Dooney & Bourke and is a philanthropist who has invested his wealth into ventures seeking novel cures for […]

George Mitchell, the former senator and U.S. Special Envoy for Middle East Peace under President Obama, joins us to discuss the escalating U.S.-Israel standoff over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's campaign against an Iran nuclear deal and open rejection of the two-state solution. Last week, it emerged Israeli intelligence spied on the Iran talks and […]

He’s not yet made it official and neither has she, but Jeb Bush, the likely Republican presidential candidate is showing no hesitation in criticizing likely Democratic presidential candidate, former Secretary…Click to Continue »

The House Committee investigating the fatal attacks in Beghazi, Libya has formally asked Hillary Clinton to appear before lawmakers for a private interview to answer questions about the use of…Click to Continue »

On Reality Asserts Itself, Craig and Cindy Corrie tell Paul Jay, "people find hope in the work that we're doing and in the fact that Rachel was there that day, and stood against what was happening to all of those families in the Gaza Strip"

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. House committee is seeking a private interview with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over her use of private email and a personal computer server while at the State Department, the panel said in a letter released on Tuesday.

(Reuters) - Indiana Governor Mike Pence said on Tuesday he will "correct" the state's Religious Freedom Restoration Act this week to make it clear that businesses cannot use it to deny services to same-sex couples.

(Reuters) - Indiana Governor Mike Pence said on Tuesday he will "correct" this week the state's new Religious Freedom Restoration Act to make it clear that businesses cannot use it to deny services to same-sex couples.

PHOENIX (Reuters) - Arizona's governor on Monday vetoed legislation that would have kept secret for 60 days the identities of police officers involved in deadly shootings, a move that was both welcomed and heavily criticized by separate state police union leaders.

Media

from Howl

I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse
O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night

October 7 1955

"a remarkable collection of angelson one stage reading their poetry"
"I think Allen Ginsberg standing up there reading - putting himself on the line - was one of the two bravest things I've ever seen. Remember, it was '55. People had crew cuts, and they looked at you like you were misplaced cannon fodder. The country was being run by Luce publications. It was a dangerous, cold, ugly time, and it was scary. . .
In all our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before. We had gone beyond a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the grey, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellectual void - to the land without poetry - to the spiritual drabness. We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it as we went into it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision."
-Michael McClure

Democrats…

Same as goddam fucking forever.
Over and over, in election year after election year, GE and MidTerms both… the Dems start to purr and preen, they stretch luxuriously - at just being TOLD they are going to win [...]
It never fails.
... in February of 2002, looking over the already joyless congressional stragglers willing to be drafted for duty… they barely dreamed, yet, it was even possible (Howard, a different person then, had not arrived to say it could be done)… but one thing was clear, we could not rely on the party to swing it. Could not. You could smell it, they would screw the deal. And I am not talking about Howard and primary issues here. By the end, that was a passing political story. Chuck it on the heap.
[...]
Upshot? The Republicans make it thru. They hold on.